It seems strange that Viareggio, the most prosaic and unpicturesque of all the Italian watering-places on the Ligurean shores, should possess this wonder still in its perfection, while the sister forest on the Adriatic side has been forsaken by the sea and devastated both by fire and by the frosts of that terrible winter of 1878-1879. We once abandoned Leghorn and went instead to Viareggio for our September bathing—a great mistake, only made up to us by the drives through the Pineta in the evenings. The discomforts and the ugliness of the town have long since been forgotten—perhaps because the ups and downs of existence have shown me far less bearable ones—and now the most vivid recollection is that of the enchanted air and fragrances of the Pineta. I think it will be so in the next life; if we win through all right, we shall remember nothing of earth but its sweetnesses, and the _very_ wise people refuse to look at anything else, even now! The real philosophers, who are the real Saints, always seem to smile, though sometimes it is through tears. And there is one queer thing about tears—the people who have never wept don’t begin to know even how to smile, much less how to laugh. I am always sorry and frightened for them if they are nice good people, for we all have to pay our little tribute to trouble, our tithe to humanity’s debt; some get it spread all over a lifetime, some all in a moment, and these are the spoiled ones of the nursery on whom I suppose long discipline might have lain too heavily for their courage. I remember one startling case that impressed me very deeply, that of a nice American family—father, mother, and daughters twain—pleasant, harmless, good-looking people with plenty of money and perfect health. I liked being with them, though our views of life were severed as the Poles, mine reaching out to the impossible and sensational (I was very young!), and theirs so satisfied with the comfortable half lights of their own surroundings that they simply could not imagine anything desirable beyond. One day I gave voice to my curiosity. “Do tell me about yourself, Mrs. ——,” I said to the mother. “You look just as young as your own daughters. I don’t think you can ever have had a trouble!” “I never have,” she replied, turning on me her mild, satisfied gaze. “I cannot remember a single sorrow in all my life, not a death in my family, not an hour’s sickness even, amongst us all. We have all, _always_, had everything we could wish for.” It was the first time I had ever heard any one say such a thing, and I felt awe-struck and envious. A few months afterwards they all went back to America, at least they started to go. Their ship went down in mid-ocean, and the dear people reached home sooner than they had expected. But, for that sharp short suffering, it is just possible that life and its unending pleasantnesses might have made it hard for them to get to Heaven at all.